YouTube
Center is good software. It’s an unofficial browser extension to
make YouTube work better. Works in most browsers; for Chrome you download
the Opera .crx file and drag it into the Tools/Extensions
page.

What does it fix? #1 thing is it lets you disable
DASH playback, the nonsense YouTube
implemented a couple of years ago. In theory DASH
makes videos play faster and more efficiently; in practice it’s
the crap that makes it impossible to pre-buffer a video or seek backwards
while playing. YouTube Center also does a good job at resizing the video
window to use more of the screen, so that a 720p video actually has a
720 row high window to play in. I also use it to prevent auto-play and
to select the video resolution I prefer.

The main drawback is that there are too many
configuration options, many of which you don’t need. Classic
hackerware; the author lets you configure everything, so
it’s up to the user to tune the few things they really need
to set.

I’ve used a few “fix YouTube” extensions in the
past that were flaky or broke when YouTube changed something. This one
seems to be working for me. I don’t understand why Google’s
let their video product get so crummy that it’s necessary to hack
it like this.

Camino Restaurant
in Oakland is one of my favorite restaurants in the Bay
Area. I’ve been there a few times, I think every time with Marc, and every time the
meal has been excellent. Worth a trip over the bridge for.

Last night’s dinner was typically great. Dungeness Crab legs,
broiled on live fire with a lovely spice coating (alas, served in shell,
but it’s literally the first crab of the season). Then a perfectly
cooked bit of chicken three ways; moist breast, a sort of smoked leg,
and a ballotine of delicious bits with strong seasoning. A little bitter
greens, a little rustic grain (farro?) to catch the sauce, simple and
refined. I even had dessert, a dense little persimmon pudding with just
a bit of quince for sweetening, very savory and satisfying. Excellent
cooking, well balanced.

Art of Eating had a profile
of Camino a couple of years ago (issue #89) that I can loan you a copy
of if you’re really curious. The article’s focus is on
their cooking with live fire, which is indeed quite homey in the open
kitchen. But while the technique impresses me I think its true value
isn’t in the smoke but rather in forcing the chef to be attentive
and careful to every single dish. Combine with excellent ingredients
and a sense of what makes a delicious, restrained meal and it’s
good dining.

Camino is run by Russell Moore and Allison Hopelain. It’s on
Grand Ave in Oakland. You need a reservation.

A bit of nostalgia
today for Netrek, one of the best
online games ever. It’s from the early 1990s and is an important
game design precursor to team based online games. Also its netcode was
a huge breakthrough in real time Internet gaming.

The game design is brilliant. It’s an 8v8 team game. You
mostly play in the upper left window, a Spacewars-like game where
you fly your spaceship around and zap other players with your phasers
and torpedoes. But the real game is in the upper right, the
galactic overview map. The goal is to fly to planets and take them
over by beaming down armies while fighting off the enemy players. That
combination of high level strategy and local tactics is a hallmark of
RTS games like Starcraft, MOBA games like League of Legends, and squad
FPS games like Battlefield. I’m not saying Netrek invented that
whole idea (Netrek itself
was based on
PLATO Empire),
but it took 5–10 years before mainstream games became as
interesting as Netrek. There were even classes in the game, different
types of spaceships for different roles.

The network code was also hugely innovative, particularly the UDP
code from 1992. Back then the Internet was overloaded and
slow, 56 kbit/s links were common. Andy McFadden rewrote the original
TCP netcode to use UDP and suddenly the game became way more
playable on congested links. The key insight is UDP lets the game
client decide what to do about packet loss rather than relying on TCP
retransmits. Netrek could afford to lose the occasional packet; you might
not see a torpedo coming your way but then again you didn’t have
to wait 3 seconds for that packet before seeing the 25 other torpedoes
launched afterwards. Weirdly most contemporary games use TCP (despite drawbacks),
although League of Legends at least is UDP.

Netrek partly benefitted from the great
community of the academic Internet of the early 90s. I’ve
run into a few old Netrek buddies in our later careers as working
software people: Andy
McFadden and Jeff Nelson at Google and Stephen von Worley of DataPointed. I wonder if any of
the Netrek folks went on to work in the gaming industry?

Huh? What’s an HTML tag doing in this whois response? And under
what circumstances might that script tag be executed? I can imagine
a naïve Web interface just injecting that script wholesale into my
browser. Every way I load the referenced script it seems benign (right
now), but that’s an attack vector waiting to happen.

The Elgato Game Capture HD is good
hardware. For $150 it captures HDMI video and audio from a game
console and writes it to your computer’s hard drive. I bought
it because Grand Theft Auto V was so astonishly beautiful I wanted
to capture
some of what I was seeing. There’s nothing particularly
game-specific about the product, I think it’d work to record
any unprotected video
source.

The device
is an HDMI passthrough. HDMI in, HDMI passed through (no
delay), video also compressed and sent via USB to a computer
with (few seconds delay). The native output format is an
MP4 container with H.264 video and AAC stereo audio. The capture
software is remarkably good; simple capture controls and live
streaming to sites like Twitch. There’s even an easy little editor
for extracting excerpts and uploading to YouTube or whatever.

There are a few drawbacks. The device doesn’t seem to support
surround sound and only allows stereo input, so no surround sound
is possible via HDMI. Also it has to be powered even to pass through
video. Between those two hassles I don’t feel like I can leave my
game console plugged into it all the time, so instead I’m swapping
cables when I want to use it. Also it can’t quite do 1080p at 60fps,
not a problem quite yet but soon to be one.

Still for $150 it’s a pretty
capable video encoder. If you need a cheap way to capture HDMI,
it’s worth a look.